Garroway on Rosenblum, 'The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World'


Jordan Rosenblum. The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiii + 193 pp. $99.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-09034-7.

Reviewed by Joshua Garroway (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles)
Published on H-Judaic (June, 2018)
Commissioned by Katja Vehlow (University of South Carolina)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52429

Jordan Rosenblum’s second book-length treatment of Jewish food culture in antiquity comes on the heels of his successful 2010 offering, Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism. The present volume is less triumphant, in my view, but nonetheless will prove valuable in certain settings.

The project Rosenblum proposes struck me at first blush as worthwhile and apt. Arguing that “not enough attention has been paid to the internal and external justifications” (p. 1) for ancient Jewish food customs, Rosenblum aims to explore “how ancient Jews defended the kosher laws and how Others—including the Greeks, Romans, and early Christians—critiqued these practices” (p. 2). His interest, therefore, is less in what ancient Jews said regarding how the dietary laws should be observed, and more so in what they said about why God commanded such laws and why Jews should observe them. He contends that Jews inevitably relied on three (not mutually exclusive) rhetorical strategies to justify the laws of kashrut (dietary laws): reason, or appeals to rationality; revelation, or appeals to divine authority; and allegory.

Each of the book’s seven chapters considers the rationale appearing in a designated set of ancient sources. First come the laws of the Hebrew Bible, followed in turn by sources from the Greeks and Romans, Hellenistic Jews, the New Testament, Tannaitic literature, Amoraic literature, and the Church Fathers. The survey of sources is thorough. Readers familiar with ancient Jewish food culture will find all the usual passages examined and Rosenblum, a capable exegete, often provides insightful analysis.

Where the book falls short, I find, is not in Rosenblum’s failure to marshal the appropriate sources or to analyze them carefully, but the inability of the sources themselves to provide answers for the questions posed at the outset. An oft-repeated refrain is Rosenblum’s concession that the corpora under discussion make little or no attempt to justify, defend, or explain the dietary laws. The chapter on the New Testament, for example, is bookended by the disclaimer that these texts “actually say little about the rationalization for biblical food regulations” (p. 77). That is a difficult concession to make in a book purporting to examine the ways ancient sources rationalize biblical food regulations. Similarly, the two chapters on rabbinic literature remind readers more than a dozen times that the rabbis display far more interest in how dietary laws are to be observed than in why (pp. 89, 98, 99, 101, 105, 108, 112, 115, 116, 122, 123, 126, 130, 131, 139). On the rare occasions when they do ask why, with few exceptions (e.g., the allegorical interpretation of birds of prey in Leviticus Rabbah 3:4) the rabbis refuse to answer. They say, as Rosenblum puts it, “Because God said so. Now, shut up and do it” (p. 128). While Rosenblum casts this refusal to respond positively as a rhetorical strategy, to me it represents the admittedly disappointing fact that the rabbis by and large took no interest in justifying the dietary laws.

The more successful chapters, then, are those in which Rosenblum discusses ancient figures who did in fact seek to understand why God gave such commands and why Jews ought to observe or reject them. Chapter 2 explores the (often amusing) attempts by pagan authors to understand the Jewish aversion to pork. Chapter 3 looks at the ways Hellenistic Jewish authors—principally Philo, Josephus, and pseudo-Aristeas—sought to rationalize the food laws as inculcators of proper comportment and as allegorical instructions for ethical behavior. Chapter 7 describes how the allegorization of biblical food laws resurfaced among certain Christian interpreters of the second and third centuries, only to a different end: whereas Philo, for example, advocated allegorical interpretations of the food laws without abandoning the expectation of literal observance, Christian writers considered awareness of the allegories as an alternative to observance. For the Christian writers, as Rosenblum puts it, “one may eat a pig, eagle, or cuttlefish, so long as one knows not to act like one” (p. 157). While I am not sure there is anything novel about the analysis in these more successful chapters, I did find them to be helpful, readable surveys of the sources.

One reason for the effectiveness of these surveys is Rosenblum’s clear, accessible, sometimes even casual prose. He indicates that he honed his presentation of this material before undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin and that he hopes the book will appeal to nonexpert readers “beyond the ivory tower” (p. 6). I think it will. While I wonder whether this book will have a significant impact on scholarship in the field, I would not hesitate to recommend it for introductory courses in Jewish studies. It would probably also prove valuable in the education of lay Jewish audiences, whose hunger for knowledge about Jewish food culture often seems insatiable.

 

 

Citation: Joshua Garroway. Review of Rosenblum, Jordan, The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World. H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews. June, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52429

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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